An Evening of Examined Life

In ancient Greece, philosophers exchanged ideas in boozy and informal symposiums; today they mostly do it in classrooms and lecture halls. Last month, three professors, a writer, and a documentary filmmaker got together to try out both models in a single night, first as part of a panel discussion at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium, and later, less than a block away, in a more convivial throwback style at the apartment of donors to the university. (No matter the era, full-time intellectuals always need patrons.)

Round one was the public debate, which marked the release of James Miller’s “Examined Lives,” a historical study of twelve major philosophers, men whose biographies suggest that the quest for knowledge might be hazardous to one’s health. The book begins with Socrates, who died after being forced to drink hemlock, and ends with Nietzsche, who spent the last eleven years of his life paralyzed in a mute stupor.

The panel was tasked with addressing the question “Does Philosophy Still Matter?” (Miller’s book had just been featured on the front of the Times Sunday Book Review, and its subject seemed to matter to the five hundred or so people in attendance who had braved the evening’s snow storm.) Miller said that though philosophical inquiry had real and lasting value, he had concluded that those who seek rarely seem to find.

The others shared his ambivalence, especially about contemporary philosophy dominated by professionals.

“It’s of no practical utility,” said Simon Critchley, who moderates the Times’ philosophy blog, the Stone. “It doesn’t make you healthier, wealthier, or anything like that.”

“One thing I would never do is ask a philosopher for life advice,” said the documentary filmmaker Astra Taylor, a former student of Miller’s at the New School, who had interviewed eight such people for her most recent project, “Examined Life.”

The Princeton professor Cornel West was asked if Christ had been a philosopher.

“Jesus? No, not at all. He wasn’t a philosopher at all. He’s God. God don’t need to be a philosopher. That’s the last thing he wants to be. Philosophy is for we mortals, vanishing creatures, not the ones who bounce back on the third day.”

The unexamined life may not be worth living, but at the close of the public portion of the evening, the examined one didn’t have much going for it either.

The group added a few members to reach a dozen, and a brief walk up a quiet, snowy street to a warm and well-lighted apartment, a few glasses of wine, and the first course of dinner served by two handsome, black-clad waiters seemed to lift everyone’s spirits. Two fireplaces were lit and an elegant dachshund padded about underfoot. Earlier Cornel West had defended philosophy, saying, “There is something to be said for intellectual hedonism.” This new setting was an improvement; academic panels aren’t designed to offer pleasure.

Before the second course, the evening’s host, the writer and former art dealer Tom Healy, who shares the apartment with his partner Fred Hochberg, president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, dinged his glass and started round two, the symposium, or at least a tamer modern version. He posed a question that dates back at least to Plato: which best illuminates the human condition, philosophy or poetry?

James Miller began. Must the two be mutually exclusive? Plato may have criticized poetry, but his writing contains fictional characters and can be viewed as a dramatic text, he said.

Cornel West, holding court at Healy’s end of the long rectangular table alongside the novelist Russell Banks, agreed. “That’s part of the civil war going on inside his own soul: that he is a poet but he is suspicious of poetry. He is trying to argue for reason and argument having a role.”

West: “Not necessarily. Are there arguments in Hegel’s ‘The Phenomenology of the Spirit’ ”?

Miller: “But is it a narrative?”

West: “The whole thing is a narrative. It’s like a romantic novel.”

“It’s rather slow moving,” Banks said, after a moment, setting off raucous laughter at the table. If there were ever a place for droll philosophy humor, it was here.

“Well, it’s not a page-turner,” admitted Simon Critchley.

“I’m talking novelistic exceptionalism here, I’m sorry,” Banks said.

“After hearing Barack Obama yesterday, all this exceptionalism is killing me,” West said, referring to the President’s State of the Union address. The group laughed harder. Political jokes work everywhere, even ones made at the expense of the President in the home of one of his major 2008 fundraisers. (Hochberg was out of town, in Washington.)

Soon, the conversation had become an upmarket version of a late-night dorm-room rap session. The group gossiped as much as it philosophized. People started asking desert-island questions. Allowed just one, would you take Plato or Sophocles? Consensus was reached for Sophocles—a win for the poets. And then later, which philosopher would you take based on the quality of his prose? The group tossed out names: Spinoza, William James, Montaigne. Someone mentioned Descartes.

“Very few people read his letters to the princess,” said Cornel West referring to the seven-year correspondence that Descartes conducted with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia.

Had the party settled on the missing link in a debate dating back to the fourth century B.C.? Probably not, and anyway, they were probably more interested in entertaining each another than solving any timeworn puzzles. (How did the Greeks get any serious thinking done in those symposiums?) People seemed to have kept their dearest opinions close—and dinner was over.

As the guests departed they passed two blue walls that featured some of Healy’s favorite quotations, painted in white. The lines went unnoticed. Speaking for the poets, as if sizing up the discussion, was William Carlos Williams: “Minds like beds always made up…” And for the philosophers, captious and ornery, was the great modern American logician Yogi Berra: “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

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